In which a veteran of cultural studies seminars in the 1990's moves into academic administration and finds himself a married suburban father of two. Foucault, plus lawn care. Comments are welcome. Comments for general readership can be posted directly after the blog entry. For private comments, I can be reached at deandad at gmail dot com. The opinions expressed here are my own (or those of commenters), and not those of my (unnamed) employer.

Sunday, March 09, 2014

Ask the Administrator: A New Faculty Rank?

Thanks to the thoughtful readers who wrote in last week, concerned. The major personal event was a good thing, not a crisis, but I appreciate the sentiments.

Meanwhile, a new correspondent wrote with a question:

I have a question/scenario that has come up at my college. The proposal has been made to add an Associate Instructor position. We currently have 4 levels of full-time faculty: instructor, and then assistant/associate/full professor. A faculty member moves up through the ranks by completing more graduate school and/or more years at the CC level. I believe that most early-career folks start out at instructor level. Functionally, there's no difference between what an inst. versus a prof. does. There's no tenure (we are all on 1, 3, or 5 year contracts); we all do student advising, committee/governance, and scholarship. We (most of us) teach 30 credit hours a year and have no summer duties unless we step into Asst Dean or other roles.

The Assoc. Inst. position that is being proposed, however, will be different. It will NOT have any non-teaching duties. They will have no assigned student advisees, and no on-paper expectation of committee or other college-wide work. They will teach "33 to 39 credit hours" and will be eligible for renewable contracts (unlike one-year restricted positions), and benefits. They must have the same minimum credentials as an instructor, but their pay will be less--the range minimum is about $9,000 less, the max about $15,000 less. Although not required by our state system, my college wishes to put the following additional restriction on the position, at least for the time being: they may only be hired to teach courses with a set syllabus and assessments, and only in areas with "demonstrable need." For us, for now, that largely means an Assoc. Inst. could be hired to teach ONLY developmental mathematics or development English (no higher-level classes). And they'd be teaching 16/17 to 19/20 credit hours per semester of, say, developmental math. (Which the math profs do NOT envy...)

The final pertinent piece of information: our president has offered to provide supplemental funding to any campus that wishes to take an open instructor position and convert it into 2 assoc. inst. positions.

The plan is being proposed as a way to convert adjunct-taught classes into classes taught by FT with benefits assoc. instructors. If this plan gives more PT employees access to secure employment and benefits, that's a wonderful thing. My concerns, though, are that we as a college will be institutionalizing the expectation (unwritten but not unspoken) that adjuncts and soon Assoc. Inst. advise students, serve on committees, and involve themselves in the non-teaching aspects of the college. In short, doing more than they are paid to do. If they do not, the alternative is that fewer FT faculty are advising MORE students, doing more governance, etc.

I know that it might seem like a non-problem, and perhaps it is just a molehill that I'm making into a mountain. But I can't help but think of parallels to the nationwide conversation about the role of and our increasingly reliance on adjuncts, and wonder if this proposal isn't a step in a wrong direction?

I'd very much like to know whether other community colleges have made a similar move, what the impacts have been on the other FT faculty/the institution more generally, and - most of all - what possible issues am I not thinking about? I'm sure there are many!

I’m guessing that the proposed new rank is a way to bring some stability to hiring, and to make the best of the coming Affordable Care Act mandate. It basically splits the difference between traditional adjunct roles and traditional full-time roles, and offers the institution the ability to find some cost savings by trading off some non-teaching duties.

Of course, that assumes that the trade-off actually occurs. In reading the letter, I’m struck by the gap between the “on-paper” expectation of no duties beyond teaching, and the reference to “unwritten but not unspoken” expectations of advising and committee work, among other things. To the extent that the latter are significant, then this isn’t so much a trade-off as a second tier of salary.

“Tiered” contracts and employment arrangements aren’t new. Many industries offer newer hires lower salaries, lesser pensions, or higher payroll deductions than earlier hires got when they started (controlling for inflation). A “tiered” approach is a way to cut labor costs over the long term without antagonizing incumbent employees, which is why it has become so popular. It’s a holding action. The folks who will pay the brunt of it aren’t at the table when the decision is made.

In this case, I’m guessing that the new rank amounts to tiering, with the exemption from advising and college service as a sort of fig leaf.

In the short term, I don’t see much impact on the workloads of incumbent full-time faculty. If these positions replace adjunct positions, and adjuncts weren’t required to advise or do service, then the impact should be quite small. Over time, though, the new rank will probably take the place of what would have been new traditional hires. (The president’s two-for-one deal seems designed to encourage exactly that.) As that happens, the advising and service workload could fall more heavily on the remaining traditional faculty, by default.

I’d also be concerned about the long-term implications for shared governance. The line about restricting this rank to courses with prescribed content suggests some awareness of the difficulty of combining shared governance with a tiered system. To the extent that the sphere of those eligible to participate in shared governance shrinks, the “shared” part becomes more questionable. Shared governance is a time commitment -- as Oscar Wilde put it, he liked to keep his evenings free -- and increased teaching loads compete for that time.

All of that said, though, the new rank is probably much more humane and appealing than the pure adjunct role it partly succeeds. An adult salary, even a modest one, plus health insurance, beats most per-course rates, and offers more stability. It may not be what a lot of people had in mind when they went to grad school, but then, neither was adjuncting. Among actually existing options, there’s something to be said for it.

I’ve heard of variations on this at other places. They’re sometimes called “professors of practice” or something similar. I’m curious to hear from my wise and worldly readers who work in places with ranks like that about unanticipated outcomes. Folks who’ve worked in those settings -- is there something the rest of us should know?

Thanks for the note. I suspect others are wrestling with similar issues.

Have a question? Ask the Administrator at deandad (at) gmail (dot) com.

Our CC has an Associate (i.e. adjunct) Faculty level, plus a "Senior Associate". SAs are guaranteed a minimum 2/3 of a full-time load and receive annual (instead of quarterly) contracts. Achieving Senior Associate status requires acquiring 3 years of above-average student and supervisor evaluations, as well as quarterly classroom observations and completion of a professional development plan. SAs receive a little more money and they are paid to hold office hours. This is generally a good thing for long-time Associate faculty, and gives them some stability. Most of our Associate faculty already teach at the 2/3-load threshold required for health and other benefits.

As someone who holds a position that is in some ways similar (though in the context of a university that does have tenure), I'd second the concerns about the effects on governance. I hold a multi-year-contract, non-tenure-track position with no service or research expectations in a department where tenure-track faculty have a 2/2 load with service and research expectations (and receive c. 1/3 more in salary). The problem we've gradually developed is that the people setting policy for courses (i.e. tenure-track faculty) are not the ones teaching those classes in the average conditions (in the context of a 4/4 load). And the people who do teach the majority of the sections, in average conditions, have little official input into policy. The department tries to bridge the gap with stipended or voluntary service, but it's not the same thing. Of course it's a good thing to convert adjunct positions to full-time ones, but it's *not* a good thing to create positions that pretend that it's possible to be a real member of the department without doing some service. Ultimately, I'd say, such positions undermine the influence of people in positions that do include service.

Or, to put it another way: what would happen if your administration tried to outsource all curriculum-planning and advising services, perhaps to textbook publishers and/or outside contractors, and convert the existing faculty entirely to the new positions you describe? How well would your current actions support an argument against such a move?

Matt, I too was concerned about your recent time off to attend to a major personal event. Glad to hear that it was for something good.

I am not sure about what this new faculty rank of Associate Instructor entails, in particular whether or not it actually includes non-teaching duties. I know that a lot of schools already have instructors on one-year contracts who have strictly teaching duties, freeing up the tenure-track faculty to do more research. In an R1 university, teaching is little more than an unneeded distraction for the tenure-track faculty.

This is reminiscent of the rank that I held when I started at Research-Intensive Technological Institute back in the 1970s. My initial rank was “Visiting Assistant Professor”, which was a one-year appointment. It was however a full-time appointment, with benefits. However, I had both teaching and research responsibilities. But I didn’t have any service responsibilities. Service responsibilities were restricted to tenured faculty members only, since I suppose that it was considered by the administration that it was too risky for untenured faculty members to get involved with controversial matters such as curriculum changes or administrative appointments. One of the humorous things that I remember from that time is a student who found out that I was a visiting assistant professor and asked me where I was visiting *from*.

As Contingent Cassandra says, there is a growing tendency for schools to outsource their curriculum planning and design responsibilities to outside concerns. In the pursuit of lower costs, more and more of the curriculum will be strictly online and will be designed by outfits like Pearson, with essentially no faculty input. The faculty (of whatever rank) will be reduced to facilitators, who wander back and forth in the classroom, watching students hovering over computer monitors. The joy of designing and running your own class will rapidly disappear. I wonder if in the not-so-distant future that Pearson will end up offering college degrees? 